Abstract
Professor G. Thomas Goodnight is a distinguished scholar and philosopher, renowned for his research on argumentation in the public sphere. Recently, he has devoted himself to developing the energy communication as a subfield. In this academic interview, Goodnight first explains what energy communication is and why it is important to our field. He then turns to emerging topics such as artificial intelligence, smart cities, and the Belt and Road’s energy diplomacy to share his latest insights on the energy issue in the digital communication age, as well as the argumentation, differences, dissensus, and their productive nature in the global transition.
Your research fields are broad. The public sphere has been an important part of your work. How did you come to develop energy communication? How did you get interested in energy in the first place? What was your trigger and background for conducting this topic, and why is energy important to our field?
Communication is a field that promises a great scope of interpretative and critical studies. Over the last twenty-five years, Communication has moved from a small field to an assembly of great enterprises: in managing cities, mapping nature, providing messaging for vast populations, and creating all kinds of information. True, in its most simple form, communication is a tool for conveying information, expressing words, arranging codes, inventing actions, and talking with others. Humans characteristically build tools to cope individually and in groups with the local environment and improve quality of life. As a tool, communication is enabled by gathering information, reflecting on experience, putting thoughts into practices, and developing efficient infrastructure systems. Communication offers ways for humans to participate in the processes of material, social, and symbolic change. All tool use requires energy—kinetic, chemical, biological, electrical, etc. Communication is a tool that depends upon material energy. Communication gathers up also social energy, motivates individuals and groups to gather, talk, and decide, thereby releasing this energy into activities. Energy offers a vast, essential assembly of systems that underwrite media infrastructures, everyday mobility and exchange, and economies across the globe. Modern communications are marvelous. But, humans are becoming increasingly dependent on electricity, information infrastructures, systems of messaging, and the timing of encounters.
Energy communication is a field that is developing, here and there. Its scope is global. Its time is now. The great powers now make and change alliances with energy forces in mind. All communication, I think, hinges on energy or forces that enables the uses of power over time. Energy communication studies the biological, physical, and cultural means of production. The uses of energy to enable information exchange, everyday mobility, and media presentation—all these are growing. A key question is how to extract primary power from varied resources with safety, reliability, and efficiency. The United Nations project on sustainable development and resilience rests on questions of energy availability, transfer to power, and more equitable distribution.
My early experience with energy goes back to my youth in Houston, Texas—Energy City, my home. Houston is also known as Space City, referring to its role in guiding orbital rockets and satellites. Houston was a town in those days, built on top of rice fields. Its 20-square miles were criss-crossed with bayous and rivers meandering toward the Gulf of Mexico. My Goodnight side of the family includes numerous teachers; my mother’s side includes a rather long line of philosophers and clerics. The six children of our household were educated in Catholic schools. We all took jobs to help out. My first contact with Journalism was bundling and throwing newspapers from my bicycle to household doorsteps. Some summers, I worked for the Santa Fe Railroad or the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. As the youngest member of a seasoned crew, I traveled the roads of East Texas to work on oil wells. Wearing metal helmets and thick gloves, we struggled to lay pipes in the day’s heat. In the evening, my co-workers fiddled at roadside honky-tonks or bars. We fixed well-work over rigs, sorted out drilling equipment, checked heater treaters, fixed pumps, and laid pipe. For the Santa Fe railroad, I worked on a dock at night and loaded trucks, switched containers, and got the boxes of commerce stitched from train to truck. These jobs gave me my first encounter with network communication infrastructure—from a labor and material standpoint.
During my undergraduate years at the University of Houston, I debated at tournaments where I visited local tournaments and ones on a national stage. Academic debate involves orally arguing issues of policy change. Debate is an extra-curricular activity in American schools. Its educational idea is that good judgment can be reached by deciding between two sides who presents the force of the better argument. Then, the United States was debating environmental change. The groundwork was being laid for energy and environment discussions for the next 50 years in the west. Debate was attractive. The art of argument held me in thrall. How could one be communicative with other minds, when views are so diverse, tentative, and subject to contestation?
International affairs have always held an interest for me; science, too. At the University of Kansas, graduate work led me through cognitive science and rhetorical studies of communication. I wrote on the beginnings of the Atomic Age and on the Atom as a model for communication, with entropy being an inherent feature of any system or process. My initial publication on energy and society was a monograph for Communication Monographs with Thomas B. Farrell on Three Mile Island(TMI). “Accidental Rhetoric” characterized the publicity of the TMI nuclear reactor incident (Farrell & Goodnight, 1981). Words and radiation spilled out from the broken reactor. The unexpected, indeed impossible, had occurred. The state capital of Pennsylvania was put in jeopardy. No one knew quite what to do. Many panicked. Safety schemes and public relations (PR) plans become part of the wreckage. The TMI monograph was a first start into an increasingly prominent area of risk communication and science. These studies have morphed into critical technology, and society studies (STS). Farrell and I exposed the vulnerability of communication control systems to “accidental rhetoric..” I recently completed an essay with Takeshi Suzuki examining the energy disaster, government authority, and the Fukushima disaster. Rhetoric has a way of happening despite the best communication plans and controls (Goodnight, 2023).
Communication is a field that appears to have two sub-areas. The first is Journalism includes editors, writers, reporters and others who gather news and frame messages for various publics. The second is the study of different forms of communication at interpersonal, business, professional, or media contexts. What is energy communication? What are the reasons to develop this subfield?
Journalism is a counterpart to communication in the United States. At each place that I have studied, there is an excellent journalism department: The William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas (PhD); the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern (Professor); The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California (Professor). The journalists I have known were all deft writers. Each could slice a phrase like a chef cuts for the table. The tragedy of the journalism in the United States is the relationship between news operations, company ownership, and profit. The impact of digital aggregations was to implode models of news profitability. News in the United States has many fewer writers than it once employed. There seem many fewer outlets of news. The local paper evaporates. There is some funding for investigative reporting. Journalists are trained to be a jack of all trades. Environmental journalism appears to be a dying field, not only in the United States but in other places as well. At the same time, there are signs of creativity, particularly in science and nature newsletters, blogs, and long-form coverage. We have specialists appointed in our School at University of Southern California to study the Arctic and to commit our students to Sustainability. A task of these programs is to train journalists in how to communicate. Yes, communication is a tool for publicity training at our research university. Yet, I believe communication study could be so much more. What actually does constitute competent, informed and credible news stories at the local, regional, national, and international levels? What are the stories of the Anthropocene that will tell the true tales of the biosphere, energy, society, work and environment? These sorts of questions have drawn me to work with colleagues across the globe over the past decade.
Studies in energy and environment were initiated as a sub-field of communication by Daniela Endres and her colleagues early in the 21st century (Cozen et al., 2018; Feldpausch-Parker & Endres, 2021). 1 For example, Tarla Rey Peterson led the way by studying agricultural energy, where farmers and experts cooperate in preserving cattle-grazing rural counties by sharing expert and local knowledge (Peterson et al., 2007; Peterson & Horton, 1995). I think energy constitutes movement, transition, and transformations across our living planet—in agricultural, urban, and other biosphere areas. Energy underwrites all forms, practices, and assemblies of communication. In fact, the energy industries have developed global, national, and local networks of communication that reflect a complicated assembly of practices that must respond to local needs, regional resources, and the commitments of a nation.
The study of energy and environment needs to be imagined in its dynamic relation to the expanding universe of communications within which the 21st century planet is trying to find a sustainable and resilient orientation. Environmentalism is a good beginning, but this field is already so contested and worked over in its basic orientations that discourse has reached the level of incommensurable views of reality. The peoples of the world need, use, and traffic in energy—for the foreseeable future. In my view, energy communication is vital to a field that now needs to address an expanding universe of communications. What was a tool is now an accelerating human experiment to study the complex changes in communication guiding change from the wasteful industrial age into vibrant efforts to connect long-traditions with cosmic horizons? In particular, energy communication focuses relentlessly on the geo-communication of societies in transition. What geopolitics were to the 20th century, geo-communication and energy are to our contemporary times. Geo-communication entails among other projects the opening of discourse, provision of messages, assembly of platforms, and automation of labor on behalf of sustainability and resilience. Waves of communication can be deployed to heighten likelihoods of war or peace. Geo-communication presents an irenic turn of the fields of Journalism and Communication.
It is very insightful to see communication as a tidal force. Hence, the environment and society’s responses to the impacts and outcomes of the communication and communication industry should be resilient, just like our planet’s elastic response to tidal waves. What we need to do is to keep or expand the resilience. The vision of many technology systems claims to make our cities more resilient, like Smart City. How do you evaluate digital technology as another kind of energy for city operation?
The rise of the city over time marks distinctive periods of civilization. The 20th century marks the growth and spread of modern cities. The populations that live together require daily movement, engagement, travel from work to home to agencies of business and pleasure. Each city rests on a biome that expands beyond the urban scene. Every biome marks a different spot on the planet, with varied assets and problems that enter into the well-being of citizens. Communication through professional and volunteer work can labor to save a city, in times of floods or other disasters. Communication through crowd gathering and private walking places can add to the well-being and reputation for residents and visitor. Cities are dependent upon energy, but the cultural energy involved in the global city these days is growing rapidly. Urban areas are vulnerable to pandemics, however. Systems of mobility carry human passengers, who themselves carry unknown infections. For four years, the sociality upon which global society depends was thrown into a crisis. Strategies of isolation were imperfect. Advances in immunology were made. The lights of Wuhan provided for a glorious celebration of cooperative, if painful, survival.
Late modern communication developed risk societies, according to Anthony Giddens. Tradition does not involve the use of data to measure the likelihood of outcomes if one action is taken or delayed. Risk society offers important measures to operations, such as medicine, that underwrite well-being within urban and rural contexts (Giddens, 1999). Twenty-first century risk society still depends on probability estimates. Ulrich Beck believes that risks have reached such magnitude that it is difficult to sort out one from a bundle of hazards or problems (Wimmer & Quandt, 2006). For instance, how does the global north reduce its use of fossil fuels and at the same time finance development of the global south, which by and large are for the foreseeable future coal economies?
The United Nations put into play a global program on sustainable development and resilience. The city is a place where management and communications matter a great deal. The systems of services must be delivered, decayed systems repaired, and ruins turned to reusable space.
The UN topics spaces for cross-national discussions among experts, civil servants, and citizens. Sustainability can be a power discourse: rational, political, and logical and can be supported through information, data, and institutional intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the possible ways to organize the policy choices of these discussions. Michael Bloomberg’s Foundation is leading a large assortment of Mayors from cities across the globe to pursue this end (Bloomberg Cities, 2024). The intelligent city will have to meet the sovereign requirements of the state in which it lives, for example. But, smart cities will borrow from one another and establish a post-Westphalian local practice of sovereign care for the urban world. Resilient communication is dependent on dialogue. Dialogue is essentially engagement; things must be discussed and people must be kept open to changing conditions, goals, and relations. The International Council of Mayors brings government representatives together. In the United States, we have a council of Mayors and one of the State Governors. These groups maintain a public presence and open sources of communication regarding problems and solutions.
Cities face growing pains. Some encounter disasters. Climate change brings about catastrophe. Sustainable communication and biological resilience comprise traditional systems legacies in any great, surviving city. What worked in the past is not guaranteed to withstand the present. On the contrary, indigenous ways—long dismissed or half-forgotten—can inspire and provide perspectives that warrant attention. The weather may exceed predictions. Too much or too little of a key environmental factor may throw a city out of balance and limit its ability to recover. Furthermore, old hazards and sacrifices of the citizens of a town may no longer be necessary, if they ever were.
The contemporary city offers AI enthusiasts something like a giant experimental scene where multitudes experiment in cooperation and competition. Humans and other creatures are brought together and must communicate with one another in a pluralistic variety of ways. Local government experiment with communication, systems, and processes of the city. For example, in preparation for the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles is turning light poles into information sources. They found that if you connect electricity to information flow as input or knowledge into daily flows of traffic and the need for lighting, and also add solar panels, you essentially have created a knowledge grid that overlays the city. So, as in China, shared bikes and ridesharing are also about how to put information controls and have real-time knowledge of various sorts. Multiple dashboards are being created. Planners prefer “holistic” planning based on “real-time” data and citizen input on plans and values. New cities develop these advantages. Recall, though, that the energies of the more comprehensive series flow in a wide array of roads, wires, and electronic data across a region. Furthermore, older cities of the global south promise to grow in novel and exciting ways to meet the living needs of 21st-century urban life. AI and cities may become helpful coping mechanisms, but the particularity of city communication depends on borrowing sustainability generally and conducting a dialogue over justly addressing local needs.
China is working beyond the Smart City to the Intelligent City. What the intelligent city does is create different streams of information about where your following problems will be and how happy people are with your services. The United Nations has thought of 350 different hazardous contingencies. The contingencies involve both uncertainties and unknowns. When trying to repair a contingency, the question is what changes must be addressed and what infrastructures do not follow known blueprints. Riots of plastics, waste, and rot are essential to figuring out sustainability. Just as in the late 19th century, European cities had to figure out water, sewers, energy, and electricity, the 21st century will have unique geo-communication experiments and needs. So, the intelligent city brings decision-makers the conditions, opinions, and changes the cities get.
As you mentioned in your famous “sphere” essay, “the public sphere is being steadily eroded by the elevation of the personal and technical groundings of argument” (Goodnight, 1982). Considering your recent interest in artificial intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLM), I am wondering how you see the impact of AI technology—as one of the technical spheres of argumentation—on the public sphere under “the paradox of expanding communication technology and the decline of the public sphere,” to borrow your words. What are some of updates or revisions you would like to provide to the “sphere” concept in the digital context?
In 1982, I introduced the study of spheres to the field of communication (Goodnight, 1982). The three spheres of communication were the personal, technical, and public sphere. The basic idea is to examine what were the dominant spheres of communication at a time that were exercising power. In 1982, the mass media were framing problems so that they had personal meaning to an individual viewer. Modern media framing enables a few big companies to frame stories. The narratives I viewed did not enable the viewer to join or work with others to deliberate the issues raised. Journalism was ignoring the “public” aspect of an event, that which invited “deliberation” or a meaningful discussion among choices. The point of the spheres essay is that critical thinking requires caution when one form of discourse attracts another and together the spheres drive out the third. This seems to me now a variation of the classic three-body problem.
Since this essay, the idea of the public sphere has taken off in many directions. I taught a graduate seminar at Northwestern University on the Public Sphere. Many of my students have built on and elaborated this idea. Furthermore, Jurgen Habermas published his dissertation in English. Habermas sets the public sphere against the private and tells a declinist thesis. Public opinion used to be rational because stakeholders discussed commerce and insurance in early modern times. Now, the newspaper is controlled by state and market. The Habermas thesis over the years has generated much discussion. In my own view, it is better not to overtheorize public. Rather, the relation of nations, media, publicity, governance, and markets vary to such an extent that it is better to be open to social learning about the ongoing development, spread, cooptation, and decline of multiple public spheres across the globe. Studies in publics of the global south and across Asia are timely. These are developing.
The relation between publics and inequality and digital communications is a topic with which I work. On my recent fall tour, I participated through Zhejiang University at the formation of the International Digital Equality Alliance on 7 November 2024. It is important, I believe, to recognize that “deliberation” is a form of communication that is not necessarily attached to any one cultural tradition, world view or ideology. It is also important to recognize that the political economy of communications have consequences. Thinkers tend to extrapolate from their own privilege and pay-wall protection to describe features of publics. Publicity does raise questions of ethics and power, but these need to be approached critically. Dr Shuya Pan of Renmin University of China and I are presently working on debates over AI and audiences vulnerable to its corporate dreams and ambitions (Pan et al., 2024).
AI applied to the internet constitutes an effort to automate aspects of the public sphere, particularly through individuating the flow of streaming media to cultivate and groom the habits of persons assembled into groups that constitute predictable and profitable revenue schemes. The cybersphere is that realm of personal, professional, and public normative discussion and debate over the causes and consequences of communication industry control structures.
So, to me, cyberspace is material while cybersphere is a normative and critical space where culture and creativity flux into normative/constitutive questions of governance and ethics—an entangled space in which multitudes gather to articulate, discuss, and deliberate over transitions necessitated by the apparatus of information gathering, the process of datafication, and the manipulation of behavior incentives wrought by the communications industries—in their competition and cooperation to convert systemically acts of exchange, interaction, and transaction (as well as expertise, entertainment, and engagement) into sustainable commodities (Hong & Goodnight, 2022).
You anchored China with its Belt and Road Initiative as an important entity in the novel change constellation of Anthropocene. However, energy and sustainability have not yet been popular topics in Chinese communication academia. How do you evaluate China’s position in the global energy issue and future of sustainable communication?
I think the Belt and Road is reawakening world history. The three continent relation of Asia, Europe and Africa made up the known world for much of human history. The ties of the old silk road are rewoven in the material and information infrastructures that cross central Asia and the Indian Ocean. History has always been moving vibrantly across corridors between East and West because biological, material, and cultural matters are exchanged. The contemporary Belt and Road is a serious long-term commitment to leadership. Given its diplomatic ambitions which seem to me to be a vector as opposed to the same everywhere, the idea with leadership is how China has different faces for different parts of the developing world and listens to what the people in the particular regions self-determine. There are specific kinds of goals.
Belt and Road offers a developmental compass. The compass orients. The metaphor holds the promise of transition of old ties to transforming new bonds. At base, the diplomacy is about energy. Energy through cultural diplomacy and through credit ties as well. China has the advantage of leading the communication role because you have both space and propinquity. Nobody else has both in such abundance. Geopolitics and geo-communication are a material dialectic of history with hard and soft communication being what is in contest. At the macro level of globalization, a hyper object can occupy a key space that reconfigures energy in incredible ways. The corridor of Belt and Road and its infrastructure layouts can create new possibilities that are attended to the trade of commodities, food, oil, and so on with less cost. It can act as a hyper object due to its newness, engineering, and reconfiguration of trade routes. What you have is a place where global nodes appear that connect the world.
Thus, repurchasing infrastructure is important in thinking about Belt and Road, which is a globally shared piece of city in communication. Contemporary diplomatic missions certainly started with connections to Greece, central Europe and later major European Union powers like Italy and Germany. Europeans recognized that relative trade dominance was shrinking. So, Belt and Road will succeed to the extent it can assemble energy infrastructure across central Asia.
One of the ways to think about that is to review the most significant energy developing countries in Asia. India is an example. China and India share a similar energy mix but their energy policies are not going to be the same. I think the common goal shared by China and India is engineering infrastructure projects that increase economic vitality of specific regions and districts. Engineering has communication obligations. More engineers constitute a dynamic a labor force that is dealing with hard communication. Also, engineers need to be apt in figuring out the desires of a community to use materials, resources, and money to demolish this in order to secure that. Planning, engineering, and communication is a subfield of cooperation yet to be developed—in times of digital resources that anticipate, monitor, and report.
Another specific issue along the Belt and Road is coal. The countries along the Belt and Road are coal countries that constitute an important overseas energy exports and imports for China. How are they going to fit in with the plan toward net zero? Is that a realistic goal? What needs to be done is to share that coal expertise and figure out trade relations with coal and other forms of energy. China has the largest renewable energy, aggressive energy mix, and ability or platform and AI calculations for each of its border nations loaded with coal. Then it will have a realistic base work: energy diplomacy. Belt and Road is a vast road of conduit of extraction of resources. How do we make it one that has autonomous and healthy pieces of the global body? China can do this and its experiments come a huge way in a decade. If you have it as a marker of the research on Belt and Road, it is incredible.
The research on Belt and Road as well as the Journalism reporting projects and programs have grown over the last decade (Shahriar et al., 2018). The research is productive because it maps the tensions among types of projects, debt and financing options, ways of governance, and the independence of nations in alliance with China. The narrative is unfinished. Belt and Road initiatives have increased the work of international relations between China and Europe as well as among the United States and its partners in Asia. The teaming populations of post-colonial Africa will craft a future. Plans to modernize and rise to prominence in the later 20th century may be facilitated or hampered by the arc of global affairs.
Your research is always focus on the argumentation, differences, dissensus and their productive nature (Zarefsky, 2012). Speaking of China, the ballooning U.S.-China rivalry has continued to affect geopolitics. How would you see the historic moment of “Real Differences” (Rogers, 2023) that the U.S. and China are going through, and where is the pathway to work for a globally shared common life amid these differences?
Last year, I visited China as a Fudan Scholar from late summer to winter’s winds. In the first few weeks, I met faculty, worked with students, and attended the Shanghai Forum on Artificial Intelligence. It was my first trip after staying home from the pandemic for several years. Typically, after pandemics, survivors release energy into many projects—even while the scars of suffering remain. The visit was at a unique time that China and the U.S. are both coming out of the terrible experiences of the pandemic. There are things that need conversation urgently. Travels took me North to Tsinghua University where I discussed Journalism and the Anthropocene. I lectured to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on Science Communication in the United States. I gave a talk on Big History at the East-West Conference on Communication. I travelled south and visited Wuzhen World Internet Conference and delivered talks at Zhejiang University (on platform stuides and on aging), at Fudan University (on tides of global change and national transitions) and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (on the culture, creative and information sectors). Each convention, center, and department I visited had a different talk, but everywhere each university shared a common situation. What would communication look like in a post-pandemic world? What projects and practices of communication would be augmented, erased, or accelerated by Artificial Intelligence?
“We are all sharing an expanding universe of communication,” I believe. This was the central theme of my talks. Across our planet are generated more human and machine-made messages than ever before. In a few short years, low orbiting satellite system will multiply access to communication networks across the globe. We also have more ways of turning noise through sensors into patterns of communication among sentient beings. Furthermore, in the works are an expanding number of platforms, industries, and state supports that turn media to instruments of development, emergency notification, and recovery. Sustainable and resilient communication is a goal for 21st century University research and studies.
The hospitality I received from colleagues and friends at China’s universities was warm and beautiful. I thank my hosts. The trip offered me a unique opportunity to travel with my son, James Goodnight, a commercial photographer who programs and develops AI projects. AI appears a complement to universities in China. The United States has limited funding, cut back, and grown suspicious of its great schools, at least since 2008. China’s long-term plan seems to be working, but talent needs time and space to develop—without pressures of overly ambitious production numbers. I do value the diversity of China’s communication schools. Journalism is important, to be sure; but, each school I visited works on communication in their own, dazzling ways. For example, at Shanghai Jiaotong University, I saw posters and displays by a team of students that was sent to work with villagers from a remote mountainous region. The students helped the village develop a public face; and the villagers informed the students about how an ancient mountain area could take on vibrant ambitions. Indigenous knowledge that closes distance with urban students is necessary for a rising generation to confront the conditions of accelerated technological communication and environmental change.
Communication varies at different level. The appreciation of these differences as opportunities, as adding knowledge and vitality to projects, is important. At the micro level, we can think of micro publics as expressing local creativity, experiences, and needs—perhaps suggesting interest to neighbors or a greater region. Conversely, relations among nations require communication at a macro-level to define structures of co-operation and processes of competition. The United States and China need to work together to be vibrant and create models of success and learn from models of other success. Thinking about global affairs and communications needs to be conceived as a broader category than public diplomacy. Geopolitics needs a new partner among the relations of nations. Geo-communication is useful in preserving geological and geographic global commons. Geo-communication as a practice would foreground mutual interest in survival, well-being and diversity—in the long and short term. Nationalism and geopolitical propaganda turns up the volume through discord, but there are harmonies among nations that recur in timely ways. The exchange of the broader university communities builds a basis for long-term relationships among nations.
Are there any potential agendas that could be further explored in the area of energy and communication/resilient communication? What advice would you like to offer on how can we expand the communication research universe?
21ST CENTURY COMMUNICATION INQUIRY. Communication has been narrowly defined. Each new media seems to gin a whole new thinking about address, even though the arts of human communication are ancient. Media studies offer an impressive array of studies that now compete with the practices of news and journalism. The roles of communicators are co-opted and renamed by media studies. The field once featured newspaper and publics. This tradition worked within that of speaker and audience. Questions of adaptation, adjustment and message are important. With computers, communication was re-sorted. Grammar and syntax were reduced to codes that could be put into play by software. Further, the distribution of computers once served a clerical purpose like typewriters. Now, entertainment and games are pre-eminent forms of exchange. Cell-phone addiction is measured in hours per day, and lost time per week. Mass media advertising is still with us, as are the entire assembly of modern media technologies.
Contemporary communication needs to explore encounters at varied levels of scale. Communication at the micro-level occurs principles of exchange among biotic entities. The micro-level of communication also involves kinetic, chemical, and physical properties and principles. Communication at the personal level involves the lives in the arc of development, maturity, and decline. Family conventions are changing rapidly. How social communication structures can be identified and stabilized are questions that are raised, particularly when new modes of communication change human relationships from relationships in spatial proximity to remote work. For example, communication and robotics are needed for aging populations across the world. Communication at the meso level raises the issue of energy and waste. What combination constitutes a manageable relationship with a biome? How can principles of equity be deployed, particularly when some sections of society are cut off from access to communication. The same sections may be most vulnerable to a disaster. The national work of communication remains robust, but questions of standing to communicate are becoming complicated, particularly when networks routinely cross areas of a city or the borders of a country. At the macro level, communication reaches toward questions of sustaining areas of the global commons such as the Arctic. Furthermore, the oceans and the cosmos are spaces where communication reaches out to imagine times older and spaces more complex than previously imagined. There is much work for the field to do.
COMMUNICATION, AI, AND LABOR. AI is a master narrative of change and investment that needs to be approached with hope and skepticism. AI is a long-standing concept. The specifics do not comprise a finite set. AI is a speculative entity—what may be yet to be built or developed in the future with computers, scientists, and information. The process of building AI projects is inherently diverse, it seems to me. Energy efficiency is promised by AI, for example. This is a crucial feature of the intelligent city. Yet, energy uses go way up as AI reaches maturity in the United States. What sorts of computing and servers are being developed? Will, the tokenized uses of electricity function as a common good, a currency for extracted profits, or a public utility that serves the well-being of all? Are the increased energy needs of AI worth the costs of environmental extraction and the security risk to integrated information systems? The positive impacts of AI are advertised widely in the United States. The negative impacts are literally not known fully, yet still the systems go forward.
The uses of AI and disaster communication are a growing field in the United States. Only recently, the American Congress authorized AI in the mapping of fires in the West. The relation of AI to the environment, however, is still a matter of conferences and contention.
The IEA Global Summit on People-Centred Clean Energy Transitions provided a platform for ministers, policymakers, labour leaders from the IEA Clean Energy Labour Council, CEOs, youth representatives, indigenous voices and other international experts to engage in vital discussions about some of the most pressing socio-economic issues at the heart of fair and inclusive energy transitions. (Global Summit on People-Centred Clean Energy Transitions, 2024)
The meetings of global summits, government officials from different nations, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provides a rich texture of communication experiments in extending the talk among elites, experts, specialists, and organizations to broad virtual communities. The railroads, steamships, telegraph, cables, and press of the 19th century provided a surge of modern development, too. Communication thinkers need to figure ways to describe, interpret, understand these visible, marvelous activities as they strive to build resilience and resolve into the peaceful, enlightened practices of exchange and transition.
Media studies are important, too. The uses and abuses of social media seem to be a large area of study everywhere. Disinformation and dissimulation appear to follow viral infections on the internet. So, social media has not been an unequivocal benefit for the United States. True, the federal government is working to assure remote access to rural populations. However, social media is not regulated by and large. When academics study social media influences and disinformation, conservative congressmen enter and threaten to sue or bring discipline to researchers. Nevertheless, a lot of work is done with big data in advertising, PR, and marketing. These studies add fuel to the fire of a market world of overconsumption, waste, and artificially constructed needs. The history of the PR industry is long. Recently, the Annenberg School has produced a document that outlines ethics as a concern for PR. Moreover, marketing studies that feature reduced levels of consumption and satisfaction are being pursued. Media studies offers jobs and practices. Media thinkers develop multiple working relationships between business and cultural studies. Platforms offer creative spaces for a full palate of communicative actions with a corporation, government entity, or private think tank. State-of-the art practices have not yet reached maturity, empirical work is lively and well in Communication, but the relation between computer science, information science, and social sciences are still to be worked out.
ENERGY AND HEALTH DIPLOMACY. Energy and Health diplomacy dwells in the use and restraint of dynamic power! Energy diplomacy is constructed and builds a historical dialectic that faces off fossil fuels and carbon-based culture against transition non-fossil fuel-based alternative such as biofuel, wind, solar, and nuclear power. There are several main topics to energy diplomacy. Health diplomacy is constructed as a dialectic among conditions of illness, contagion, and infection that effect populations with predictable, limited predictability, or unknown patterns. Energy and Health diplomacy are distinct in modern settings. Energy and Health diplomacy are a hybrid where people can talk together in their roles as members of international organizations, doing the work of NGOs, experts of engineers and communication scientists, members of health communication infrastructure, and people with a long-term disability, attributed health conditions, or an individual with a problem. Health and Energy diplomacy offers communication development from a wider-mixed perspective. Hybrid communication systems are likely to become workable, given advances in LLM and Machine Learning.
Who owns the rights and is willing to trade on a particular energy or mineral deposit? Who is accountable for health consequences of energy extraction and use?
What infrastructures need to be put in place for the mining, national transportation, cross national shipping, storage, and distribution? How can infrastructures be transitioned to providing access for health inquiry, engagement, and work with and across biomes?
What are the alliances that control energy exports and imports? What dynamics can be created to expand the training, development, and certifying of health workers among nations?
How do goals of environmental repair and restraint serve and contradict energy baskets and policies?
How are differences between energy promises to international organizations and actual policy explained, defended and changed?
How are energy and mineral wars, revolutions, or counterrevolutions played out? This area includes the nationalization of resources on one hand and the use of sanctions as a tool for leveraging policy compliance on the other.
What roles do films, video, blogs, and broadcasts play in explaining and situating energy and health as a topic?
How does food and the biosphere add or detract leverage on fuel trade and food availability?
What are the consequences of accidents and threat-vulnerable energy plants, infrastructure, and waste?
What is energy and health justice in dire situations? Is the threat of energy embargo similar or different than food embargo?
Diplomacy follows Nye’s dichotomy between hard power and soft power (Nye, 1990). Energy diplomacy inquiries into dynamic material and immaterial invention, gathering, network, use, and sustainability of power over time. Energy diplomacy can be viewed as a subset of geopolitics, with its emphasis on conflict, realism, and national sovereignty. Energy diplomacies can be developed along the line of geo-communication where sustainability and resilience are essential elements to developing and securing relations among nations around the world. The pods for cooperation and guardrails on energy were set by President Xi and President Obama at the Paris Conference of 2016. Collaboration among Think Tanks offers a way to evolve knowledge of issues, ground rules for diplomacy, and improved global systems of communication.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council program (Grant No. 202306320174).